Month: June 2012

An experiment: Because I don’t get the time to write half the articles I’d like to on this blog, I’m shoving the half-finished, the TODO pile, and some rough notes onto a separate blog Anomaly UK Realtime. Some of the scribbles there might yet make it to here as proper articles, but most probably won’t. Currently I have brief pieces up on Tanistry, the abolition of a parish council in Lincolnshire, and whether everyone should learn to program.

I wrote in the last post that the unthinkable can become thinkable shockingly fast.

We can see an example of that on any day’s news at the moment. As the current Private Eye reports, in 2002 the Mirror Group Chairman held a lunch, at which the then Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan made a speech featuring jokes about various celebrities, based on the voicemails he had heard. These included even references to messages between then England manager Sven Goran Eriksson and former TV weathergirl Ulkrika Jonsson, who was present at the event.

Private Eye is bringing it all up to prove the dishonesty of all those who are now denying that they knew or suspected anything at all of such outrageous activity as phone-hacking going on. But to me the fact that they’re now hiding it is much less significant than the fact that only ten years ago they didn’t feel any need at all to hide it. Almost overnight (and I particularly noticed how sudden it was because I left the country for three weeks in 2011 and it happened while I was away), what had previously been taken for granted became a huge scandal.

Another example was raised recently — that within living memory, leading US evangelical Christians were in favour of legalising abortion. I read an article a month or two back which explained how, like the 2002 Mirror Group lunch, writings of prominent protestants have been dropped from the narrative, not because they’re embarrasing to the people involved, but because they simply does not make sense in the context of the narrative as it is presented today by everyone.

The conventional wisdom, as modulated by the popular media (but I’m not sure their role is all that vital) is governed by the following constraints.

Everyone wants to say something interesting

Nobody wants to be seen to be wrong

People have very short memories

The result is that there are remarkably few public arguments about substance. It is much more effective, whether you are a media pundit or a political practitioner, to show that you are the most in tune with the conventional wisdom than to claim that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Since everyone important agreed with the conventional wisdom of five years ago, it is in nobody important’s interest to remind people that it’s the opposite of what everyone agrees with today.

Where there are disagreements, the number of things that have to be assumed on all sides — because they are part of the current conventional wisdom — but which are blatantly untrue make realistic argument about the facts impossible. So instead, we have emotional arguments about meaningless abstractions — things like “Austerity” or “Europe”, that are safely divorced from the things that are actually going on, and can be consistently supported or opposed while one fictional narrative after another sweeps through the newspapers.

(It is also safe to argue about weak foreign countries. It doesn’t matter what’s really going on in Bosnia or Egypt or Syria: we can have an argument about who to kill, based on our fantasy conventional wisdom, and nobody who matters will ever know or care what was actually happening.)

There is, at the same time, a kind of debate among the elite that deals with facts rather than imaginary narratives, but it is not independent of the fantasy. It would be nice to think that the people who really run things could get together at a Bildeberg meeting or something and actually try to work out what real solutions exist for real problems, but if that was ever the case, it probably isn’t now. I rather suspect that that was always an aspiration for those meetings rather than a reliable achievement.

As I said in a comment recently, P.R. is fundamental to government. Most of the hard problems in government are about how you get group X to accept A or group Y to support B. Many of the people who rise high in the elite are those who are able to solve those hard problems, and in many cases I suspect they are good at that because they honestly believe the fantasy narratives. If the media and the mob were really having their strings pulled by a secretive cabal of cynical technocrats, things would probably work a lot better than they do. It’s much more likely that the tail is wagging the dog.

But the upshot of all this is that democracy can be thrown under the bus just as quickly and as decisively as The News of the World and Yugoslavia were. It doesn’t even have to be for a good reason. By 2017, saying we should still have elections for government would be as odd as saying that journalists guessing celebrities’ voicemail passwords isn’t a big deal or that Yugoslavia was a sovereign country and forcibly breaking it up from outside was illegal.

Unfortunately, while I can see that it could happen, that’s not the same as knowing how to make it happen. Predicting herd behaviour, contra Isaac Asimov, is probably the hardest thing there is.

It might be worth collecting a list of huge non-partisan shifts in belief.

I’ve mentioned previously the idea that humanitarian political action can only be taken with UN approval. That went from not being suggested at the time of the bombing of Belgrade, to being generally accepted by the buildup to the 2003 Iraq invasion.

The notion that children up into their young teens can never be left unsupervised (as opposed by Lenore Skenazy) has arrived somewhere in the last 20 years, not sure exactly where.

I saw a post recently attacking constitutional monarchies (can’t find it now, I think it was one of the Ortho types). There is also an article by Sean Gabb, specifically criticising HM Queen Elizabeth

Both articles are correct on the facts. A constitutional monarchy is, for practical purposes, a republic, with all the faults of a republic

Further, the Queen’s practical influence over the last sixty years has been, as far as we are able to tell, smaller than it could have been and harmful in its direction.

Does that mean that neoreactionaries should stand against the celebrations of the second Diamond Jubilee in British history? Of course not.

The value of our monarchy is not in the effect the monarch has either on public opinion or on the government —- both are negligible. The value is as a reminder and as an alternative. Some day this war’s gonna end. One day, maybe one day soon, though I don’t hope for it, democracy will fall apart: due to lack of electricity or money, unresolvable election disputes, exposure of criminal entaglement of all of them, civil war among the progressivists, or some other Black Swan I haven’t even thought of. When it does, we will need a ruler with some other basis of legitimacy. And we have one, ready to hand.

If it does happen soon, the new ruling monarch will, like Juan Carlos in 1975, not doubt see himself as a caretaker, overseeing the handover to a reconstituted democratic regime. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That is where we come in, between now and then: our role is to make the concept of restored monarchichal rule an alternative.

That’s not so very far-fetched. Democracy could go out of fashion. Try just dropping into conversation the suggestion that Her Majesty (or the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Cambridge) could not actually be worse as a ruler than Gordon Brown or David Cameron, and quite a few will accept the point. That doesn’t make them Royalists —- they still see the idea as unthinkable, but not as actually bad. The unthinkable can become thinkable very quickly if the right noises are made publicly (I have another article planned about that).

I wrote much the same thing on the occasion of the Duke of Cambridge’s wedding. My argument is that the actual merits of members of a constitutional monarchy are not relevant. They, like the rest of us, are products of a liberal democracy. The choice of both the Queen and the Prince of Wales to concentrate their public attention on matters of great unimportance (the Commonwealth and the environment, respectively) is one forced on them by their situation. Could they have done better? Undoubtedly. But you restore monarchy with the Royal Family you have, not the one you might wish to have.

I suppose there is another path, the only one open to republics, to start from scratch: let somebody rule absolutely, and start a dynasty. It could work. It’s not at all preferable, though: the first King must actually be a politician, and the politics is likely to stick: the North Korea precedent again. It would be easier for a republic to adopt monarchy if a constitutional monarchy could make a success of it first.

Failing that, probably the best bet for a republic is total collapse, and a recapitulation of the phylogeny of monarchy via anarchy, warlordism and feudalism. Possibly this is what John Robb has in mind when he talks about neofeudalism —- I’ve not quite been able to understand him. The whole process needn’t take longer than a couple of generations, provided technology doesn’t regress too far on the way.

Restoration of a constitutional monarchy to an absolute one seems a much smoother process.